Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock. With me, as always, is my very, very, very good friend.

[00:34] John Barber: John Barber.

[00:35] David: Handsome devil, John Barber, back with us, as always.

[00:37] John Barber: I look pasty and dead.

[00:39] David: John, we're not alone today. We've got to keep this thing professional today. We've got a professional with us. Welcome to the show, co-owner of Challengers Comics + Conversation in Chicago, a real-live retailer, John, a real-live comic book retailer with us today. Patrick Brower, welcome to the show.

[00:55] Patrick Bauer: Hey, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I did notice that you did not say I was handsome, nor did I get one, much less three, ‘very’s in front of my name. So, I already know where I sit in this pecking order for this podcast. So, I'm ready.

[01:10] David: It takes a lot of buttering-up to keep John coming back. Let's just be real.

[01:13] Patrick: Let me immediately apologize to John that you get me from Challengers, and not co-owner, W. Dal Bush, who is, A, a huge Transformers fan, B a huge fan of your run, specifically, and C, recently said how disappointed he was, whenever he goes to either comic conventions or Transformer conventions, and he's looking for off-market fan art, things like that, he can never find specific things from your run, and he's very disappointed. Everybody likes doing prints, or whatever he's looking for, from the series that ran parallel to yours, but he's always looking for specific characters that you delved into, and he's like, “I can never find stuff from the John Barber run. It's disappointing.”

[01:58] John: Well, he's a man of taste. That's been the Corner Box. Thank you all for joining us. I figure it's not going to get any better.

[02:03] David: I think we have peaked at The Corner Box. At least one of us finally got a compliment. Fantastic.

[02:08] John: That's very kind.

[02:08] David: Look, we don't talk about it a lot, Patrick, but John is in the Transformer Hall of Fame. This is a real and true thing.

[02:15] Patrick: Hands down. I'm not even a Transformers guy, and I know the pedigree with which I am dealing today.

[02:20] David: We’ve got chops here, man. We’ve got some people with some chops here, and I will submit that John's run on Optimus Prime with artist Kei Zama is still some of the finest Transformer comic books you will ever run into. I loved that series, and I was getting those things for free, and I still would have bought them.

[02:39] John: Whoa.

[02:39] Patrick: Same. Dal, who owns a comic bookstore, was also getting them for free, still bought them.

[02:44] David: Patrick, in addition to co-owning a fantastic comic bookstore with W. Dal Bush, you also have a podcast of your own, Contest of Challengers, and I listen to it religiously, and in fact, it's one of my favorite, if not my favorite, podcasts.

[03:00] Patrick: Can you feel I’m blushing through the audio, dear listener?

[03:05] David: But the one thing that I've learned from your podcast is that W. Dal Bush does not like being on a podcast. So, my question would be, does Dal like John Barber of Transformer Comics enough to actually come on the show, or is it still a bridge too far? Is it still like, “oh, man. I'd really like to do that, but I can't be on another podcast?”

[03:27] Patrick: You know what? I think he would. Do either of you have any affinity for Kamen Rider?

[03:33] David: Yes, he talks about it quite a bit, actually.

[03:34] Patrick: All the time, yeah. So, I mean, if he could talk more about Kamen Rider, maybe. It's not an outright no, which is better than anybody gets. So, yeah, if he was coming on to talk about Transformers, yes, and again, John, he's a big fan of yours. So, I'm sure that he would love the opportunity.

[03:51] John: That's so nice.

[03:52] Patrick: Yeah.

[03:53] David: That is very nice. Patrick, I'm really grateful for you coming on the show. You're the first retailer that's been on the show. This is our third season, and I've been wanting to have a retailer on the show since we started. So, thank you, once again, for showing up, and what I'd like to do for our listeners, and for you, is you do your own podcast, as I said, and there's been a lot of interviews with you, in and around comics. So, I hope that people go out and search you up, and search your store, in particular. After listening to your podcast for a couple months, I became a regular subscriber to your store. Pretty much all of my new comic books are coming from your store now. Everything gets packaged super sweet, very nice, zero complaints, and I've been with you now for about 8 months, I think. So, really enjoying the experience there with your store, remote. Never been into your store. I hope to get there someday, but Chicago's pretty far from San Diego. So, it's a long walk. So, I'd love to talk a little bit about you, but I also wanted to talk about the year in review. It's the end of the year here. We're recording this in the middle of December, and I wanted to pick your brain about what you're seeing in the industry this past year, and what you think the highs and lows are, the hots and nots. My first question to you, Patrick, if you don't mind just jumping right into it, talking about the state of the industry, what were a couple of your biggest challenges, as a retailer, here in 2025?

[05:12] Patrick: I think that the obvious answer for any retailer for 2025, and the biggest story in comics in 2025, has to be the ending of the long-running distribution channel, Diamond Comic Distributors. Diamond, who was technically, legally, not a monopoly, but the only game in the industry, for retail, if you wanted to carry Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, everybody. You could only get those publishers through Diamond, and ever since the pandemic, things got shaky in the distribution industry, when Diamond chose to shut down, which, honest to God, saved us, as a store, because Chicago shut down, as a city, and nobody was allowed to come into the store from mid-March to early June, and if Diamond was still shipping comics to us weekly, that we didn't have the ability to sell to the general public who would come in, we would have gone bankrupt very quickly. So, them pushing pause and putting the brakes on comics distribution for that time period, which hurt them as much as anybody else, saved at least my store, if not so many other stores, but some of the publishers weren't happy that their products weren't being distributed that way.

I know you asked me about 2025, and I'm immediately telling you about 2020, but that's just leading up to--it's all context--and once other publishers were unhappy with Diamond stopping publishing, they were like, “well, we're going to make our own distribution channels.” So, that's how we got Lunar, and gosh, another one that only lasted six months, whose initials I can't even remember--They were run by Midtown. Then, if you wanted DC Comics, you had to open an account at Lunar. So, most everybody did, and then all that money that Diamond was getting from DC, they stopped getting, and then Marvel went to Penguin Random House later in the year, and if you wanted your Marvel books, you had to have an account with Penguin Random House, and Diamond lost all that money, as well. So, it was writing on the wall that Diamond was in trouble, and they did as much as they could to save the industry. They had this initiative that “our comeback will be better than our setback.”

Not for them, it wasn't. We all knew that they were on shaky ground, and even Dal Bush had said at the end of last year, he's like, “I gave Diamond until about April,” but mid-January of 2025, Diamond announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that was not unexpected, but still a huge event in the comics industry, mainly because most everybody was still getting product from Diamond--a lot of smaller press publishers, and a lot of merchandise, a lot of non-comic product, and that became in jeopardy, and then suddenly, that all went away, and Diamond was eventually sold, and many bitter lawsuits came up between the new owners, the old owners, the wannabe owners, the existing publishers, the former publishers, and anybody that had inventory in stock, and it just got real messy real quick, and the moral of that story is, we haven't gotten any shipments from Diamond Comic Distributors in months.

[08:25] David: That is so wild. In 2010--we've talked a little bit about this on the show, too. In fact, I think, John, didn't you prognosticate the bankruptcy of Diamond, and literally the next week, it happened?

[08:38] John: I think it was the week our episode came out.

[08:41] David: Yeah, you were incredibly crazily accurate with that one. If somebody told you in 2010, “Diamond's going under right now,” that would have been the end of comic books.

[08:50] Patrick: Oh, yeah. We routinely said, “we can survive, if any one publisher went away. If DC goes away, it'll be tough. We can survive, but if Diamond goes away, that's it,” but even towards the end of last year, we were saying, internally, that we can survive without Diamond. We just don't want to have to. When I got into this industry, many years ago, in 1990, we were getting our books, back then, from a local distributor called Friendly Frank's. They delivered all their books in long boxes, and you got to keep the long boxes, as well, and we were working on a larger scale with Capital City out of Madison, Wisconsin, and then Capital was eventually bought by Diamond, and this was in a different life. This was pre-Challengers. Dal and I worked for a different chain of stores. In fact, not only had we moved from Capital to Diamond before Capital got bought--I was instrumental in that change, and it was mainly because, at the time, from Diamond, I think it was a VP at the time, Bill Schanes, had reached out to me to say, “you guys really need to come work with us,” and I was able to convince the owners of that other store, at the time, to transition.

It wasn't necessarily my doing, but I started the ball rolling, and I always felt a little bit of pride, we were able to navigate that before Capital was gone, and we were forced to make an immediate change, and then we were with Diamond for the rest of my tenure, and then the first thing we did when Challengers became a thing was open a Diamond account. We actually had a lot of difficulty in the beginning, with shipments not coming in, or not being right, and all sorts of problems, so much so that I had emailed then-Diamond-VP, Eric Beck, asking if this was a personal attack, which I didn't think it was, but I figured using that type of language would get a better response, and it did, and there were so many hoops you had to jump through. You had to justify your location, your geographical location, in regards to other stores that were around, near you. They would say, “well, this store is two miles away from your location.” Yeah, two miles in a major metropolitan city is like being in a different state. Yet, when stores opened down the block from us, I don't recall them ever being a problem, with Diamond like, “you want to open one train stop away? Fine, go for it.” Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

[11:15] David: It was personal, Patrick.

[11:16] Patrick: Yeah, right.

[11:17] John: I mean, in San Diego, the three stores I can think of are all on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.

[11:23] David: I know. It's not even a joke. Literally, in all of San Diego, a metropolitan city of well over a million people, and all the comic bookstores are all on one street.

[11:33] John: We have a big comic convention around here, too. I don't know.

[11:37] Patrick: I've heard of that once or twice. Yeah. In Melbourne, Australia, there's five major stores, and they're all within blocks of each other, and they all do dollar amounts that stagger my small Midwestern mind.

[11:49] John: Yeah.

[11:50] Patrick: Yet, they're so close.

[11:52] David: That is wild. It's just a preference of who they want to hang out with on a Wednesday, I guess.

[11:57] Patrick: Speaking of San Diego stores, I've never been to Now or Never, but it looks amazing. It's a wonderful new store you guys have that I just haven't--

[12:05] David: Yeah, I haven't been there myself, actually, but I've heard a lot of good things about it, just recently. I'm too busy shopping at a comic store in Chicago.

[12:12] Patrick: There you go. Never have to leave your home. The books come you, David.

[12:16] David: It's very nice.

[12:17] Patrick: One of the games I like to play with anybody in from out of town is, they tell me where they live and I try to guess the store they go to. I'm not even right 50% of the time, but if they're like, “I'm from Ohio,” I'm like, “you go to Laughing Ogre?” Yeah. No one's ever impressed. No one's ever surprised that I can pull out of thin air the store they go to. “No, I go to Bob's Comics.” “I'm sorry. I've never heard of Bob's Comics. It's my lacking for not being from your small Idaho town, sir,” but anyway, Challengers opened, getting the majority of our product from Diamond, because that's the way we were taught, and over the years, one thing we pride ourselves on is the sheer number of places we get books from, and I don't just mean distributors. I mean, currently, we use Lunar and Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, and Scholastic, and I'm just trying to look, in my head, where all of our ACH payments have to go. Let's just see who I'm missing--but so many really small or local, or direct-from-creator books. We try to stock things from everywhere, and our list of vendors each tax season is well over 100 different places, and that could be somebody walking in and off the street saying, “hey, will you buy my zine?” That wasn't a thing we did in our previous life.

[13:43] David: This is probably getting way too into the weeds, but we're talking about 2025, and some of the challenges, and Diamond going down is one of your challenges, it sounds like. I'm sure there's opportunity there, too, which I'd love to hear about, but the question that I've had recently, that I haven't had answered, is now that Diamond's gone--buying everything from one distributor, your discount, I'm assuming, was pretty meaningful. You're getting a good discount--So, now that your purchases are spread out across 100 different distributors, how is that affecting your business, in terms of, your nett has to have gone down, and how are you navigating that?

[14:20] Patrick: It's quite a bone of contention, at the moment. PRH, short for Penguin House, who handles Marvel and IDW, and Dark Horse, and obviously, their own line of books, and whatnot, they give everybody a blanket 50% off. It doesn't matter how much or how little you order. Everybody gets 50% off, and they offer free shipping, which is amazing, but the products we were getting previously, we had a not-considerably higher discount, but the free shipping doesn't make up for what we lost in discount, and at Lunar--everybody, each of the individual publishers has their own structure, and it's earned based off of what you spend, and the goalposts keep moving--and for the start of Image being at Lunar, they gave everybody the highest discount, which was amazing, but now they’ve changed that, and it's volume-based, and next year, the discounts get considerably lower. Image has changed their discount structure for 2026, and we are losing 3.5% from what we were getting. 2025, our Image volume is the highest it's ever been, but we're still going to be losing 3.5% per book in 2026, and that is a significant portion when you add it up over a 12-month period.

[15:45] David: 3% might not sound like a lot to our listeners, but that is eating into a margin right there. That 3% is eating into a margin.

[15:52] Patrick: And Lunar doesn't have free shipping. Their shipping is very reasonable, and it was a long-standing Diamond complaint that nobody understood their shipping. They billed it the week after. So, when you were paying for this week's books, you're also paying for last week's shipping. So, you're always confused. You immediately look at the number of boxes compared to the amount, and that doesn't match. No, you have to go back to last week's amount of boxes to see what that was supposed to be. It was never an easily calculable percentage. With Lunar, you know what you're going to be paying per box, and I'm only not mentioning it because it's different based on geography, and Lunar ships their books--the furthest out in the country, they get shipped the earliest. They're located in South Bend, Indiana, 3 hours from where I'm sitting. So, we get our books sent out last, and sometimes, that means we get them much later than everybody else, and there've been plenty of weeks where I'm like, “can I just come pick them up?” I'll take that six-hour round-trip drive if I can just go get them.

[16:52] David: That might be a cost-savings that you could actually--

[16:54] Patrick: Yeah, use regularly, and I don't want to get off topic, but Lunar doesn't even have a phone. You cannot call them. You don't have a sales rep. Whenever we're opening an account at a new distributor and they want credit references, we want to give them Lunar, because Lunar is currently our largest distributor. They get most of our money. I mean, it's close. Penguin Random House is a close second, but we can't give them a contact number, a contact name. Everybody just has to use the support at lunardistribution.com for any type of correspondence, whether you have an issue with a shipment, whether you have a billing question. It's the same e-mail address for everybody, and there are no sales reps.

[17:39] David: Look, not being able to access customer service and talk to a real-live person in 2025, there's nothing that makes me more angry than that, and no one has customer service anymore. No one. I go out of my way to patronize places that have a human being on the other end that I can talk to without having to spend 15 minutes pressing buttons. That is impossible in 2025.

[18:07] Patrick: I assume you're like me on the phone with your bank, screaming “representative” to the automated voicemail system.

[18:13] David: So, what happens when the order's wrong? You just send an e-mail to somebody, and just hope for the best?

[18:18] Patrick: Yeah. They do have the best interface for reporting damages or overages, or shortages, but if it's a serious amount, you have to e-mail them immediately to say, “please send this out immediately. Don't wait until next week, or whatever, your next shipment, or what have you,” but like I said, right now, Lunar is our biggest distributor. So, they get the most of our money, and we get most of our product from them.

[18:47] John: DC and Image, they’re both at Lunar.

[18:51] Patrick: And Oni and Mad Cave. They have a lot of smaller publishers, as well.

[18:56] John: PUG-W.

[18:59] David: Nice one, John.

[19:06] John: I was a fanatical Comics Buyer's Guide reader during the Capital City stuff. So, I wasn't in the business, or anything, but I was definitely paying attention to this stuff, and thinking about Marvel bankruptcy, and Heroes World, and all of those things, and when I went to go work at Marvel, everybody that was there in a position of power had lived through that. Dan Buckley was in a different role at Marvel, but he was back there. Not literally everybody, but there's enough institutional memory for that to be like Vietnam, or something. We're not going to go back into Vietnam. We're not going to let that happen. The way US foreign policy was, that was what was going on until the second Gulf War was, we don't want another Vietnam, and then by the end of my time at IDW, I was realizing, all these people making these decisions didn't know what I was talking about when I said “Heroes World.” Just the generational shift. Not literally everybody, again, but there are enough people that were coming in from other publishing industries, I mean. You wouldn't have got people working at a big comic company in 1996 that were coming from Scholastic or coming from Random House, or whatever.

[20:07] Patrick: Yeah, you didn't go from the book market into the comics industry.

[20:10] John: Now, you do. Now, that happens, and it was really funny trying to be like, “all of this is playing with fire. All of this is super dangerous, and the industry's gone through this.” I mean, that was probably as close to the end as the direct market came, or am I making that up?

[20:26] Patrick: By the way, there's a Canadian comic book store called Heroes World, and I can't help but wonder if they understand the connotation that […]. All American retailers who were in the industry back in the 90s would just shudder when they hear it, but that was the first taste we ever had of the distribution arm splintering, books coming on different days--when we were getting our books from Diamond, in the beginning, we'd get them Wednesday morning for Wednesday on-sale, and we were lucky enough to have, in Chicago, a dropship place where books would be delivered, or we could go pick them up. So, you'd get there around 5:30 in the morning to get your books on a Wednesday, to get them back to your store in enough time to open them, count them in, log them in, and start pulling subscribers' books before you open the door at 11, and that was the way we did it for years, and then they opened Tuesday pickup, which was game-changing. You actually had a half-day to get everything done before you went home Tuesday night, which was unheard of, and then we found out they were letting bigger accounts pick up on Mondays. Then we found out that the Geodis Wilson office was getting the books on Saturdays but not letting us get them until Tuesday.

Fine, whatever. We were happy with the Tuesday pickup. They wound up shutting that down and closing all of their distribution hubs, and just doing straight UPS, and that was in 2024, but in April of 2024, we decided that it wasn't worth it anymore, for me to drive out there every Tuesday to pick up what was an increasingly smaller amount of books, because we were still getting books from Lunar and from PRH. So, we were just getting maybe two boxes of stuff and a box of product from Diamond. This expeditor was all the way out by the airport in the suburbs. So, it wasn't worth me battling traffic and getting out there. For just these couple of books, we just shifted over to UPS, and then lo and behold, it took that away from everybody anyway.

The point I was bringing up about delivery dates is, now we have no control over when the books show up, and it could be at any point, and it boggles my mind a little bit that, if we were to get shipments today, from both Lunar and Penguin Random House, on the same day, which we do some weeks, it is an all-day procedure to get these books checked in, and that's not even everything we get for the week, when previously, we would get everything from Diamond and handle it, no problem, but now the weeks are so much bigger, the amount of product is so much more, the amount of books being published is so much more, and also, everybody packs differently.

If you're getting the same amount we were getting from Diamond, just split up into two different distributors, they pack so differently that there's so much extra boxes and packing material, and I feel really bad for the recycling industry, because we are generating so much recycling waste every week, because every box is a double box. If it's Lunar, it's two boxes inside a much bigger outside box. PRH does one box per one box. So, it's two boxes per one box worth of books, and then there's all the packing material around the boxes, which is a thing Diamond never did. They had it set. So, the boxes were exactly the size to fit in their outside, but everybody else now packs all the way around the inner box, and it's either bubble wrap or paper, or cardboard, and so much of our week is spent just cutting up boxes and reducing them to the smallest capacity as possible to fit them in a recycling bin, and that is so much extra time we waste now. Literally, it takes a lot of time and a lot of space, and we easily fill--the building that we're in, we're in the bottom of a condo building, we fill up the recycling dumpster in one day, just by ourselves. That's how much stuff comes every week. You know, within a day, when the books are coming, but not knowing, per week, when it's going to be--Is it Thursday? Is it Friday? Sometimes, it's Monday. Sometimes, it's the Tuesday before.

[24:27] David: Do you still have a set day that you call New Comic Book Day? Is it still Wednesday for you guys?

[24:31] Patrick: It's still Wednesday.

[24:32] David: You guys hold stuff until--

[24:34] Patrick: That's the legal on-sale day. It's the industry standard. It’s still Wednesday.

[24:39] David: Oh, okay.

[24:39] Patrick: Graphic novels.

[24:40] David: So, there's still a legal industry standard, despite the disparate distribution distributors.

[24:45] Patrick: Forcing issue comics. Graphic novels and book periodicals are Tuesday. Comics are Wednesday. We hold everything for Wednesday. It's just easier that way. The idea of saying to people, “come in twice,” no one's doing that. I mean, we all did when we were younger. We don't do that now. The majority of our customers aren't even weekly. They're bi-weekly or monthly. A lot of customers, we see once a month, but a small bone of contention with me is, every holiday season, we give our subscribers a Christmas card and a tiny little something in the card, and I don't know if you've gotten your recent shipment, or when your next shipment is, David, but if you haven't gotten it yet, you'll be getting a Christmas card from us. We go out our way to do a really nice card.

[25:27] David: Did you hear that, John? The owners of a really important comic bookstore sent me a Christmas card this year, John.

[25:32] Patrick: I mailed out 234 cards this year, not counting the ones we give away in the store, which is way more than that. We spend a lot of time, effort, and money on the Christmas cards, but here's the thing. They go in the boxes, December 1st. We pull them out of your box, January 1st. So, if you haven't come in December, you don't get it. Sometimes, it's upwards of 100 cards that we're pulling out of subscriber boxes.

[25:55] David: What do you do with the leftover cards? Do you just burn them in spite?

[25:58] Patrick: We take the inserts out and save those, whatever it may be. In previous years, it was a Challengers air freshener, a Challengers coaster. One year we sent out a pack of fir seeds to grow a fir tree and called it A Comic of the Future Starter Kit.

[26:16] David: Nice.

[26:17] Patrick: It's got to be something that we can mail flat in an envelope. During the pandemic, we gave out little bottles of branded Challengers hand sanitizer, but we couldn't mail those. I can't say what it is this year, because David, you haven't gotten yours yet, but it’s still something a little fun for people. We'll recycle the cards, save the envelopes for next year. So, even just stuffing the envelopes and then unstuffing them is time spent, and it's always the same people, and it's the thing that makes me angry, and there's people that'll be like, “I'm not going to come in. Can you save my card for me?” No, I won't, because we ask you to come in at least once a month, and if you can't do that, you're not getting your Christmas card. It's not Christmas anymore. It's a new year. It's not a New Year's card. It's a Christmas card, but no, that doesn't stick in my craw, at all.

So, on-sale date is still Wednesday, no matter when we get the books, and that was a thing we had to figure out how to do, as well. We don't have a lot of storage space, because we use as much space as possible for our store, and pre-pandemic, we had a couch, we had chairs--At one point, we had Skottie Young's old art table setup. He gave it to us, because he was moving away from Chicago, but during the pandemic, once people could come back in, we got rid of all the sitting, because we didn't want to encourage people to stay around, because it wasn't safe. It wasn't healthy. So, we got rid of all the chairs, and we filled all that space, and now it's like, “gosh, I wish we still had those chairs, and things.” It was a much more open and inviting layout, but we've literally filled every possible space we had chairs with product now.

[27:44] David: Are you worried about the amount of inventory you have locked up?

[27:48] Patrick: Constantly.

[27:49] David: Is that always a challenge, or is that a particular challenge of this last year?

[27:53] Patrick: I mean, it's getting more. You guys both know that there's more comics being published than ever before, and we have much less of a sales window to sell those. Basically, any book on the shelf has six days to earn its keep. That's why we really order lower on one-shots and three-issue miniseries, because they're not going to be selling. If you're a one-shot, you really have seven days, and then people move on to something new, and you're not going to be bought, and we need that shelf space. When you come into the store--it's a long rectangle--you turn to the right, all the way in the back is where we have the new release section, which is everything new for the week.

Comics, graphic novels, action figures, posters, comic boxes, whatever it is, it all goes on this one section in the back, and then we have a long wall of where all the single-issue comics go when they're not new, and they're just alphabetical by character. I'd say title, but obviously, all the Spider-Man books are under S. All the Superman books are under S. It doesn't matter. If it's Amazing, it's still under S, or Action is under S for Superman, but anyway, when a book is not new, it has to go onto the wall, and if it's a new title, a new miniseries, ongoing series, whatever, it doesn't have a space. So, that space has to be found from somewhere. So, Dal has to go through the non-new release wall every week and find space for the 15/16 new #1s that come out every week. So, stuff has to get pulled.

So, the shelf-life of things is much smaller than normal, and once you're pulled from the shelf, you immediately get dumped into our $1.99 back issues. You're immediately discounted and thrown in the back, because we have nowhere else for you to go, and our back issue boxes are bursting. A couple times a year, we go through and prune it, and then donate whatever we pull out to a local literacy organization called Open Books that do a lot of literacy charity events and reading workshops, and whatnot, and they either use the books, give the books away, or sell the books to make money for them. It's a tax write-off for us, and it gives us space, but it's a tremendous amount of work to be pulling out things that didn't sell for the third time. You were new for a week. You didn't sell. You go to this wall. You didn't sell. You go to the back issues. You didn't sell. You're gone, and all of our graphic novels are spine-out, because we did it to save space, and we separate our graphic novels by genre, like the bookstore does. Some genres are packed. Horror can't fit anything new. So, we're constantly going through, if you haven't sold in a year, you get discounted, 25% off, and then if you don't sell there, you go to 50% off, and then again, donate it to Open Books.

[30:25] David: It sounds like you've been doing this for a while. You have a system for these things.

[30:29] Patrick: You have to have a system. We don't want to have that system. We want everything to sell. What I was getting at before is, when we get next week's books on a Thursday and we've checked them all in, they have to go somewhere until next Wednesday. So, we bought these two collapsible carts. We have a tiny back room in the main Challenger store and a tiny back room in Sidekicks, which is our all-ages portion of the store, and they're just on these carts, crammed in the back. You can't walk past them, but at least the carts are on wheels. So, we can wheel them out. Where the books are in the back of Sidekicks is the furthest point in the store away from where they're going to go on the new release wall, but for the longest time, we were like, “I don't know. Let's put them on the front table. Let's put them on top of the bookshelves,” and it's like, “this looks terrible,” and if you want people to look through stuff, hide it. They find it right away. The books that are under a table and covered, not for sale, people just go digging through those right away. It's like, “what are you even doing down there?” We can only fit so many packaged bags and boards on the shelf, and then we've got a bunch of overstock under one of our front graphic novel tables, because we blow through so much during the week, we need to have overstock, and people go digging under there. I'm like, “no. They're on a shelf down at the end, with a much greater display. This is just the overstock. This is our restock section. We're not going to make you fall on your hands and knees to get your bags and boards.”

[31:53] David: You need to you need to curtain-off your 50% Off box and just make it super mysterious, and a big sign, “Do Not Enter.” You're going to blow through that stuff, no problem.

And with that, dear listener, we are going to hide ourselves and the second half of this fascinating interview with comic bookshop owner, Patrick Brower. Come back next week for the second half of the interview. Hope you're enjoying the start of the new year and everything's going exactly as you planned. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week, right here on The Corner Box. Bye.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.